This summer, a friend messaged me to say that a band called Chinese Football was playing a show near me in Berkeley, and that I should go see them. We had both lived in China for a time, and he figured I might be interested in checking out this musical export from our mutual former home. I told him I was already a Chinese Football fan and that I would absolutely, without a doubt, be going to that show.
I then proceeded to do nothing for several months, assuming that, as a Chinese band touring in a country that rarely pays attention to Chinese bands, there was roughly zero risk of the tickets selling out. Finally, a couple weeks before the show, I checked the venue website to find that there were (surprise!) no tickets available.
I was stunned. Cornerstone Craft Beer & Live Music isn’t a massive venue, but packing it was no small feat, even in a college town with a large number of Chinese students. Curious, I checked the sites for some of their other U.S. shows. New York? Sold out. Boston? Sold out. Philly? Sold out. Chicago? Same story. In all, it looked like six out of the band’s nine U.S. shows were fully booked.
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Only by leveraging my Fecking Bahamas connection and sliding into the band’s DMs was I able to secure a spot on the show’s guest list. But at this point, I was ready to go there on assignment – my journalistic curiosity was piqued. As far as I could tell, the only American sites that had ever mentioned Chinese Football was Brooklyn Vegan and this site, seven years ago. How had they sold out two-thirds of their venues on their first U.S. tour?
Unfortunately, the band didn’t have the answer for me. “We had no idea we’d have this many people come to our show,” said lead singer Xu Bo when I talked to him and his bandmates before soundcheck. All he could tell me was that many of the fans they talked said they’d been waiting for years for Chinese Football to come to the U.S., and that a few had covered Chinese Football songs in their own bands (which is an impressive statement for American fans, considering that ~99% of Chinese Football’s lyrics are in Mandarin).
What was clear was that, back in China, the country’s rock scene was having a bit of a Nirvana moment. There was now more money in the industry, with companies taking a commercial interest in promoting new bands. Xu Bo didn’t tell say exactly what precipitated this change, but I suspect a certain game show had something to do with it. Either way, things had changed. Whereas ten years ago, Chinese musicians basically assumed it was impossible to become rich from a rock band, now it was possible to imagine a path to a payday. The band sees pros and cons in this shift. On the one hand, it’s increased the breadth of the underground music scene in China, which is no longer isolated to major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. On the other hand, it’s created a new generation of artists focused on getting rich, and a new culture of fandom that’s disconnected from underground music culture. Bassist Li Lixing told me about one phenomenon where bands that went viral on China’s version of TikTok would sell out shows, only to have over 60% of their audience leave after they played their one viral hit.
Was something similar going on with Chinese Football? Was the audience at their sold-out shows just a bunch of paper tigers, ready to split after they snagged a video of Wang Bo playing that sweet riff on “Dinosaurs went extinct in the end?”
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To find out, I headed to the line for ticket check, which was already wrapping around the side of the venue. The first thing that struck me was that Chinese Football was not just catering to Berkeley’s resident Chinese population. Although there were probably an above-average number of East Asian faces in line, it generally just looked like a typically diverse Bay Area crowd. If anything stood out, it was that the showgoers skewed young, with plenty of Gen Z repping their age group in overalls and baggy jeans.
The second thing that struck me was that I, in fact, was not on the guest list for the show, something I didn’t find out until I got to the front of the line. The person at the door told me that I needed to “give someone a call,” which was a challenge because I’d mostly been communicating with the band through Instagram. I dutifully pulled out my phone and fired off a DM, quickly becoming aware of two things: that there was little chance Chinese Football would be checking their social media as they prepped for the show, and that being told you’re not on a guest list you’d said you were on was mortifyingly embarrassing.
Feeling like the world’s biggest asshole, I went to the record shop next door to pass time while I waited for CF to hit me back. I spent about 20 minutes looking through records I’d never heard of before finally deciding to call it a night and head home. Lifting my head up from a late-sixties jazz cut, I turned to leave and saw that the person standing at the vinyl shelf next to me was none other than Xu Bo, sifting through records while FaceTiming someone on his phone. Feeling unbelievably lucky (but still a bit like an asshole), I interrupted Xu Bo’s call to tell him that I had never been added to the guest list. He quickly fired off a message of his own and then returned to his call/vinyl searching. After about five minutes, he looked up and told me that I’d been added. Thanking him profusely, I returned to the front door, where I saw that my name had indeed been scribbled at the bottom of the guest list in pencil.
Counting my lucky stars, I bought a beer and looked around at the second line that was forming inside the concert hall. It was clear that Chinese Football fans weren’t fair-weather flakers – the line for merch stretched across the width of the hall and back again. I’d never seen anything like this, and neither had anyone else I talked to that night, although one person remarked it wasn’t surprising given how many Gen Z were in the crowd (if the next generation is able to save rock music, this will probably be how).
I got in line as well, not because I planned to buy anything, but because it’s easier to strike up conversations with people if they think you’re both waiting for the same thing. My decidedly unscientific survey revealed that, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the people there had been introduced to Chinese Football through the Internet. The most common response I got to “how did you find this band” was a shrug and “Spotify, I guess,” although it’s worth noting that Instagram and (of course) TikTok were also represented.
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Whatever brought them here, they were ready to rock. After a solid opening set of guitar wizardry by Standards, Chinese Football took the stage and tore the house down, playing to a packed crowd that could not have been more into it. There was stage diving, sing-alongs, and sports jerseys waved overhead. The space between songs was filled with shouts of “niubi,” a Mandarin word that directly translates to “cow pussy” but is colloquially used to acknowledge when something is cool AF. At one point, Xu Bo paused to tell the crowd that he liked California. “We like you!” came the response.
Much of the band’s banter was brief and tongue-in-cheek (“We’re Chinese Football, from China” was Xu Bo’s opening line), but their set was plenty engaging. On the song “The World Is Splitting In Two,” the band asked the crowd to separate into two halves. At one point, Xu Bo brought someone from the audience onstage to fumble through a Mandarin chorus with him (the fan was passionate but definitely didn’t speak Mandarin). Then, in true emo fashion, the band got heartfelt at the end, with the whole group joining drummer Zheng Zili in the corner, banging on different drums together in what felt like the musical equivalent of a group hug.
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In the break before the encore, I chatted with a woman standing behind me, who ended up being the only person from China I spoke with that night (other than the band itself). She had heard of the band on a podcast based out of their home town of Wuhan, on which the host repped Chinese Football as hometown heroes. It was a good reminder that, as interesting as it is to poll CF’s U.S. fanbase, we’re only a relatively small part of the picture.
The band’s name and style makes it easy to position them to the side of their Western namesake, American Football (Standards even cheekily started their set with the opening riff to “Never Meant”). But American Football peaked in the 2000s, and there’s now a generation of young people in China for whom Chinese Football is the band that brought them into midwestern emo. I have a hunch that, if Xu Bo and friends keep pulling these types of audiences on their North American tours, it won’t be long before they occupy that position on this side of the Pacific as well.
(Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out more from Collin here on Bandcamp.)
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